


Graves like beds

by marcelo



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 19:04:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20569349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marcelo/pseuds/marcelo
Summary: Torn between tired awe and glad annoyance, Horatio attempted a retreat into a well-worn role.  "My Lord! You, too, a ghost condemned?"





	Graves like beds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reine_des_corbeaux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/gifts).

Dreams of Hamlet had long been guests of his bed, and the Prince's death hadn't changed their habits. But Horatio was newly awaken — or so it was warranted by the painful pounding of his head — and yet there he was, standing in the middle of the room as he had often done in Wittenberg, careless of curfews human or Divine. A shade paler than his usual, perhaps.

"How come both Laertes and you breathe the same air, Horatio," accused Hamlet as a form of salutation, "and that with all other living men? Was your love of me so base that with my flesh it itself perished? Is there no thought of revenge in your pondering?"

Torn between tired awe and glad annoyance, Horatio attempted a retreat into a well-worn role. "My Lord! You, too, a ghost condemned?"

The Ghost approached Horatio's bed in two graceful if strangely solid steps. "Condemned, yes, as my father was. Like him struck dead in the throes of sin, not in sloth but in violence, my brain racked by celibate lusts for familiar blood. There's no Heaven waiting for me, Horatio, but revenge I must have or forever stay in this castle and be haunted by it even as haunting. Will you free me, you who once claimed to love me? Was I as ill-starred in my brother by fate as my father was in the one of his flesh?"

Horatio wants to run from the room. He wants to kiss Hamlet until either one of them joins the other's realm. He wants to cast him out of his world. None of that is new.

"Free me," pleads Hamlet. As always, he was never as forceful as when almost begging.

"And what of me, Lord?" asks Horatio. Hamlet, for once, doesn't pretend to misunderstand the question.

A crow announces with much too glee that the sky is again the sun's, and between a blink and the next of Horatio's tired eyes Hamlet is gone. 

Horatio smiles, laughs, cries. Ghosts, their body undone until Resurrection, have no material skin. And yet Horatio can still smell Hamlet's.

* * *

Horatio spends the following day as a restless shadow, for weeks now his unspoken role in the Danish court. The Queen has never asked to see him but has sent him word that he is to remain in Elsinore, and Horatio, who lost his parents almost too soon to remember them but too late not to, finds no mystery or contradiction in this. He has built for himself a routine of books and walks, one he finds congenial despite his pain. The mood of the Danes, as far as a foreigner can read its strange characters — and familiarity with Hamlet helps him not with them — is content. They see the Prince's violent death as a not unexpected tragedy, rewriting their own memories of events to insert omens and far-sighted fears Horatio does not recall. 

Nobody blames Hamlet, who they claim lost his mind with his father, and how can Horatio be sure they are wrong? Sharp it remained, sharper than ever, but between brilliance and insanity there might be less a war than a marriage, equally fraught and equally close. Nobody blames Laertes, either, and not a few admire an straightforward virtue not blemished by the rumors of his poisoned blade. Should you believe the words under the words, and Horatio has no reason not to, King Claudius is only waiting for his Queen's grief to wane before adopting Laertes as their son and heir.

It's as neat an ending for the story as any writer could hope for, with tragedy and triumph, loss and gain. Horatio wishes Hamlet would have tasked him with writing Leartes' fate instead of avenging his own, and Horatio ends up writing through the night parts of each story, and then other, simpler ones, where nobody or everybody dies. What happens to Denmark Horatio cares not, so he gives it to Norway.

He only realizes the night has passed without Hamlet visiting him when the crow's caw takes him by surprise, like a betraying lover ambushed by guilt.

* * * 

The next night Horatio falls asleep early, yet it feels but a handful of heartbeats before he's somehow awaken by Hamlet's noiseless impatient pacing.

"Horatio, you facile printer of cheap indulgences, should I call down the angels themselves to wake you up to righteous actions, or will you arrive late to Second Coming like one of our fellow students to an early and dusty metaphysical lecture? Is my father's murderer's table so rich, or my murderer's honors so bright, that you'd rather let my name remain stained than risk your name or your dinner?"

Horatio snaps, as much from lack of sleep as from anything else; this, too, had been a pattern in far simpler scholarly times. "Instead of harassing me for a delay shorter and better justified than your own, has the thought not crossed your mind that Laertes, a man who having done nothing to wrong you had a blameless sister driven to death by your shameful disregard and a beloved father murdered in savage recklessness, might not deserve a life you so openly despised and an inheritance you showed no less contempt for? Is he not a better Dane than you were, and to most a better man?"

Mirabile dictu, Hamlet — dead and ghostly, but recognizably himself in every gesture, even the unprecedented — sits down by Horatio and nods. "Yes," he says, calmly, and his calm is more terrible than his fury. "I have, and he is. And yet there's something in me that cannot accept this ending, that will exile itself from Heaven to spoil Laertes' tale if it will not be mine. Is that wrong?" The question is honest, and so is Horatio's answer.

"Yes."

Hamlet smiles. "Does it matter?"

The crow caws. After a short moment Horatio rises from his bed, and if the morning is cold or hot he cannot tell.

* * *

Horatio seeks a witch, in what feels like a last attempt at saving his soul. He finds three. This is an omen he doesn't know how to read. His explanation of his plight to them is both opaque and transparent, telling nothing of the significant and everything about the unsaid. 

One of the witches asks him if he has already slept with the incubus. Another one laughs at his angry blushes and says that his visitor was probably one even when alive. That Horatio has sough their help much too late. To save his soul he should still be in possession of it.

Horatio — who had come to Elsinore not to talk with Hamlet but because Hamlet was there, and who cannot leave it because that's where Hamlet died — doesn't find it in himself to disagree.

The third witch stays silent and avoids his eyes, her own filled with sorrow. He escapes their room before he's tempted to ask her why.

* * *

Horatio's no Hamlet. Laertes would beat him at any odds, and, while death wouldn't be unwelcome, Horatio was always too poor to be able to afford gestures.

The night after the day of his decision, Horatio waits for Laertes at a spot where he knows he'll pass. Laertes has been enjoying the company of a certain fame-struck wench this week, and she's fond both of him and of the fine wine he brings in his visits. It doesn't take long for Laertes to walk past a hidden Horatio, not drunk but slow and softly weeping, who or what for Horatio knows better than to ponder.

Laertes stops suddenly, three steps in front of Horatio. "Hamlet?" he asks, in wonder, guilt, amazement. _Not fear,_ Horatio thinks, already calmly eulogistic of the dead breathing man in front of him. _Laertes never feared._ Horatio's no Hamlet. He doesn't say anything before stabbing Laertes on his back. Something guides his hand, and Polonius' son is dead before his knees begin to bend. Later, Horatio will wonder why Laertes never haunts his nights. Maybe good men never come back. Maybe souls can only be owned once.

Right now he's looking at Hamlet, who's looking at Laertes' corpse lying on the ground. Hamlet's smile is a poisonous cup refined enough to kill a kingdom, and Horatio drinks it to the dregs.


End file.
